THE four-year-long investigation into the Cannock Chase murders in the 1960s was the most comprehensive, expensive and protracted manhunt the UK had ever seen.

At its height more than 200 police officers worked from two incident rooms in Walsall police station and in Cannock where a former DSS building was taken over to house the army of staff and reams of paperwork.

Scotland Yard were called in to lead the huge hunt and more than 50,000 homes were visited with many of them being searched.

The inquiry saw hundreds of police officers, soldiers, airmen and volunteers scouring the huge wooded expanse of Cannock Chase and thousands of men being interviewed.

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A climate of fear shrouded the region, not helped by the fact that the whole country was still reeling from the appalling revelations of the Moors Murders trial, which had seen the notorious Ian Brady and Myra Hindley jailed for life.

But the stark reality in the Midlands was that three little girls had been found dead on Cannock Chase and a killer was still at large.

By beginning of November, 1968, there had still be no arrest. Police wouldn’t admit it, but the investigation was running out of steam.

Month after month of dogged police work had brought no result. Suspects had been interviewed, checked and checked again without any breakthrough.

Detectives were tired, demoralised – and increasingly desperate. The elite Scotland Yard officers who had been brought in to lead the inquiry had returned to London and on the eve of Bonfire Night, the investigation seemed to be going nowhere.

Then came an emergency call to West Midlands Police which was to change everything.

It was at 8.28pm on November 4. A man was seen trying to abduct a ten-year-old girl in Walsall, the caller said.

Det Con Conrad Joseph was working the late shift that night with his colleagues, Det Con Ted Atkins and Det Sgt Jim Love.

He responded to the call and interviewed both the young victim and the 18-year-old witness.

The then young dad-of-one had been working in the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) since 1963, but had been a police officer with Walsall Borough Police since 1958.

Now aged 73, the dad-of-two and grandad-of-six, who retired in 1988, barely needs to refer to the report, a copy of which he still has to this day.

He said: “The girl was building a bonfire on waste ground in Bridgeman Street.

“The man pulled up and tried to lure her into his car by telling her that he had fireworks. Fortunately, an 18-year-old woman walked into the street, saw what was happening and prevented the abduction by calling out.

“I have no doubt that had she not been there, that little girl would have been another victim.

“The witness made a mental note of the car number plates, 429 LOP, and picked the model out from 21 other cars in police ID books as a Ford Corsair, which was green with a white roof.

“We woke up the local Vehicle Tax Officer and he kindly agreed to meet us at his Walsall office.

“We began by searching for a Ford Corsair with the 429 LOP number and found none. But a trawl through registration numbers in the LOP series and the numbers in different sequences revealed that there was a Ford Corsair with the registration 492 LOP and it was green and white.”

It belonged to Raymond Leslie Morris. He lived in a flat at Regent House, which was so close to Walsall Police station that he could probably look down on the incident room.

Conrad and his colleagues confronted Morris at work the following day.

“He was working at an engineering firm in Oldbury and we told him he was needed with his car at Walsall police station.

“He agreed to come with us and we joined him in his car. The one thing I do remember about was that he seemed very calm.

“On the way back to the station we were talking about how nice the car was and he mentioned that he had owned a grey Austin A55 car before the Corsair.

“This alerted us because we knew that our colleagues in Cannock had connected the same model of car to the murders.

“But at this stage we had no idea that he had been questioned by the murder detectives in Cannock.”

By the time they had arrived back at Walsall, the murder room in Cannock had been told about the attempted abduction and its incident room had sent over Det Sgt John Farrell and Det Con James Speight who also interviewed Morris.

“They then told us that he had already been interviewed about the Christine Darby murder and was indexed in the incident room files, but had been alibied by his wife and was out of the inquiry.”

Morris denied the attempted abduction and walked free because he was not picked out on an identity parade by the woman eyewitness.

Bizarrely, after failing to identify him formally, the woman later told police she had recognised him but had been afraid to identify him to his face.

“Disappointment does not adequately describe how I felt when he walked out of Walsall police station that day,” said Conrad.

“But we felt that there were too many coincidences and we thought more needed to be done.

“I have been described as a dog with a bone in the past, because don’t easily give up on something that raises my suspicions.”

So, undeterred, Conrad and Ted Atkins decided to persevere with their inquiries.

He added: “The murderer of Christine Darby, Margaret Reynolds and Dianne Tift remained undetected, as did the abduction and sexual assault of an eight-year-old girl in Walsall in 1964.

“There were similarities in all of the cases that struck home and now we knew that Morris owned an grey coloured Austin A55 between 1965 and 1968, which was the car connected to the murder of Christine Darby.

“Ted Atkins shared my sentiments so we pressed on with inquiries. We wanted to delve deeper into Morris’s background, character and life to see where it took us.

“We discussed the case with Detective Chief Inspector George Read who was in charge of Walsall CID at the time, and he allowed us to continue our investigations.”

It was Conrad and Ted’s instincts that a deeper look at Morris was necessary which ultimately led to the arrest which parents across the Midlands had been praying for.